This paper investigates the changing relationship between astral science and medicine in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the development of teşrih or anatomical science at the turn of the nineteenth century. Katip Çelebi in describing the importance of anatomy in his Keşfü’z-zünun quotes the following from Ibn Sadr al-Din: “Those who do not know astronomy (heyʾet) and anatomy (teşrīḥ) are deficient in knowing God.” The parallel Qunawi draws between astronomy and anatomy elucidates how the human body was conceptualized as microcosmic in the pre-modern Islamicate world, with body parts understood as beholden to planetary forces. Building on recent scholarship on the professionalization and institutionalization of medicine in the Ottoman domains, I show how the human body’s position within Islamicate cosmology changed at turn of the nineteenth century with the introduction of new European anatomical drawings to Ottoman medical literature, notably in the works of Şanizade Ataullah Efendi. To illustrate this transformation I contrast the anatomy sections of two texts: the Maʿrifetname, or Book of Gnosis by İbrahim Hakkı Erzurumi – a popular encyclopedia of the sciences from 1757, and Şanizade Ataullah Efendi’s Mirʿatü’l-Ebdan, or The Mirror of Bodies published in 1820. Şanizade’s reproduction of anatomical drawings from Padua-trained physicians such as Andreas Vesalius signaled a move away from the primarily textual Galenic understanding of human anatomy, I argue, and a step towards a more detailed three dimensional visual understanding of the body that eschewed astrological connections. Beyond a discussion of what these new scholarly models of the body meant for Ottoman medical ontology, I also explore the practical implementation of ʿilm-i teşrīḥ: how did anatomical teaching take place in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Istanbul? Were dissections a part of anatomical instruction in Istanbul as would soon be the case in Cairo? If so, how, where and by whom were they conducted? Exploring the early-nineteenth-century scholarly publications on and practice of anatomy helps us understand to what extent anatomical science was a discrete and institutionalized discipline for making sense of nature in the Ottoman Empire.